No, that’s not necessarily the case. We even know why he was drawing an equivalency - the Jews he was speaking to are questioning “But wait, how can you say the truth will set us free? We’ve never been slaves!” to which Jesus is replying “Ah, but there are different forms of slavery; just as some may be slaves to other people, so too may some be slaves to sin”. He’s drawing equivalency of slavery in practical terms, not moral ones. It’s not reasonable to assume that someone drawing an equivalency between two things thinks those two things are equal on every point.
He spoke out about slavery to sin. He didn’t, in the part you quote, speak out about slavery to other people. Simply explained the practical effects in a way that people accustomed to seeing slavery would understand.
I’m not sure it’s reasonable to accuse me of backtracking based on what other people have written. Should I be accusing you of backtracking based on kanicbird’s Christian thoughts?
I am sure that the people who continued as slaves and who were not set free will not be particularly happy that an omnipotent God and his son didn’t take the time to speak out against the notion. Well, if they had the time to, of course.
I’m going to have to ask you for a cite on Christian civilization being the first to get rid of slavery. I honestly mean no offense, but I tend to find your proclamations of Christian firsts and unique place in history are often somewhat flawed. And, of course, you haven’t proved your point about what Jesus and the Apostles said as of yet.
I went over to biblegateway.com and did a search on the word “slave,” in a couple of the more widely used translations of the Bible (KJV, NIV). Surprisingly, there were very few hits. Hmm, thought I: I could have sworn there was more mention of slavery in the Bible than that.
I looked up the passages you refer to. There’s no mention of slaves or slavery as such, though there are “bondsmen” and references to one person being sold to another. Sure sounds like slavery to me, when you’re owning or selling people; we don’t do that anymore (although we might have one person selling their services to someone else, or being under contract to someone else). But it did make me wonder, exactly how are we defining slavery, and what distinguishes being a slave from being something else, like a servant or an employee?
But how do we know when words like “servant” are being used euphemistically?
For example, are the “manservant” and “maidservant” listed in the 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:10, 17) “really” slaves? Are there more than one Hebrew word that get translated as “servant”? (And how would a person of 2000 or 3000 years ago understand the distinction between slaves vs. servants?)
I don’t know Hebrew, so I can’t answer linguistic questions about it (though I’m not sure that paying servants was a practice that even existed at that time, so the distinction may be non-existent there), but I know that some NT versions (like the KJV) translate Greek words like doulos and pais as “servant,” when those words usually mean “slave” in Greek (especially doulos).
Checking the Greek LXX translation of Exodus 20:10 , I see that it uses ho pais and he paidiske for “male servant” and “female servant.” The usual implication of that is slaves, though it’s not as strong as the word doulos, which the LXX uses in the next chapter of Exodus where it talks about buying and selling slaves.
Interestingly, I see that the Hebrew word ebed is the same in both chapters, but the LXX translates them differently I don’t know enough about Hebrew to know exactly what that word means or which Greek translation is more accurate, though.
What’s interesting is it was precisely that realization that ended slavery in Europe. Of course, the slavery I’m talking about was serfdom. I recently read an interesting book about the history of Prussia, in it there is a passage about a Prussian Junker. He inherits some land. On this land live some people who legally aren’t allowed to leave (they can be captured and tried in a manorial court if they are, the manorial courts were ran by the local Junker–further, a Prussian Kingdom wide law existed which mandated runaway peasants be returned to the manor they fled from), and who were legally obligated to physically labor on the Junker’s private fields for a certain amount of time each week.
The newly landed Junker noticed that when his peasants had to take their turn working his fields, they did horrible work. They were lazy, late, they would bring the worst draft animals, bring their worst tools, and essentially just perform the worst service imaginable. This was near the end of “real” serfdom, so peasants had a lot of protections then versus a few hundred years prior. The Junker could try to have his peasants whipped, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time for peasant work forces to rebel against the local Junker and plunge them into economic ruin.
After dealing with it for awhile, the Junker just converted all of his tenants into cash rents, and hired outside laborers to work his own fields. As a consequence his estate went from being impoverished to being the most profitable estate (per-capita) in the region.
Good question - slavery in the old world existed on a continuum. Some forms were closer to what we now would consider a sort of indentured servitude - in that it had a fixed end-point.
In the OT, members of the Hebrew tribes were generally supposed to only “own” other Hebrews by this form; they were to be free after a fixed period; they were not allowed to kill them or do grievous bodily harm to them in the meantime (if they damaged them, they had to free them).
Slavery of fellow-Hebrews would appear to have been generally a result of either poverty (being sold for debts, or selling oneself out of desperation), or as a punishment for crime - such forms of slavery are historically common in societies lacking an organized penal system.
This appears somewhat different to the notion of race-based chattel slavery that we are more familiar with, due to (more recent) experience.
However, the rights of Hebrews over non-Hebrew slaves was more absolute. Such slaves presumably came from war captives and the like, and they were not automatically freed after a fixed time period. There is no evidence about how wide-spread such ownership actually was, though - it was unlikely to have been as significant an issue, as later under the Romans (for one, Judea was not a frequent winner of wars!)
I realize i am a little late at replying to this, but can you prove God tolerated or stated anything? If you use the Bible or Koran, then you are using the words and thoughts of other humans. You can state you believe God said or did something but in fact, you are believing another human’s words,or passed on teachings. Why would a loving God who is supposed to be a loving father tolerate such things? If a human acted in that way he/she would be put in jail as a cruel person; shouldn’t a God (or supreme being) who is said to create those people, be responsible for creating a flawed or evil being?
It did in the New World also. Slavery varied widely from time to time and place to place as far as what slaves could and couldn’t do, the types of life expectancy they could expect, their chances of ever being free, etc… In colonial Cuba for example slaves endured horrors they generally didn’t in what’s now the U.S. but because the Spanish Catholic church was very anti-slavery they had far more chance of being allowed to one day borrow their freedom. New Orleans slave society was very different from Alabama’s in the years before the Civil War, just as slavery in New England was different from slavery in New York City was different from slavery in the Carolinas at the time of the Revolution.
None of that constitutes a condemnation of the practice of slavery. It’s just admission that it’s bad to actually be a slave.
It’s immediately obvious that it sucks to be a slave. But that understanding is different from the claim that the concept of slavery is immoral. The moral imperative is quite clear for some things in the bible (It sucks to be dead; Thou shalt not kill) and not at all clear in this case (it sucks to be a slave; Uh, try not to be slaves, guys!). The first half is not sufficient.